Get a Phone Call When Your Website Goes Down (Not Just an Email)

It is 3 AM. Your production API is down. An email alert fired — but your phone is on silent and your inbox processes 200 emails a day. You wake up to find the incident has been running for four hours. Your largest customer has already logged a support ticket.

Email notifications are the default because they are easy to set up. But for systems where downtime has real consequences — e-commerce sites losing revenue, APIs serving paying customers, critical infrastructure — email is not enough. You need something that cannot be ignored.

How Monitorion Phone Call Alerts Work

When a monitor detects an incident, Monitorion can call your phone number directly. The call is a flash call: your phone rings for a few seconds, then auto-hangs up. The ring itself is the alert. No voicemail to check, no message to listen to — just an unmistakable signal that something needs your attention right now.

The call comes from +44 7520 666603. Save this number as "Monitorion Alert" in your contacts so you recognise it immediately.

Why Flash Calls and Not Voice Messages

Traditional voice alert systems record a spoken message ("Your website example.com is down") and call you. These are expensive — calls with audio playback are billed per second of connection. A flash call is answered and immediately hangs up, keeping the cost near zero while delivering the same wake-up effect.

The context is in the name you saved in your contacts. When your phone rings from "Monitorion Alert" at 3 AM, you know exactly what to do: check your dashboard.

Setting Up Phone Call Alerts

1. Go to Settings → Notifications
2. Enable Phone Call Alerts and enter your phone number in E.164 format (e.g. +12125551234)
3. Choose when to call: when an incident starts (recommended for critical monitors) and optionally when an incident resolves
4. Save your number as "Monitorion Alert" in your phone contacts

Phone call alerts are available on the Pro plan and above. The flash call model means there is no per-call charge — calls are included in your subscription.

When to Enable Phone Call Alerts

Not every monitor warrants a phone call. Consider phone call alerts for:

• Revenue-critical systems — e-commerce checkout, payment processing APIs
• Customer-facing APIs — anything where downtime directly affects paying customers
• After-hours coverage — for systems where you have on-call responsibilities
• Single points of failure — services where there is no automatic failover

For monitors that are important but not critical — SSL certificate expiry warnings, security header changes, domain expiry alerts — email is sufficient. Reserve phone call alerts for the monitors where you genuinely need to be woken up.

Combining with On-Call Scheduling

Phone call alerts are most powerful when combined with on-call scheduling. Configure your escalation policy so that:

• Step 1 (5 minutes): SMS to the on-call engineer
• Step 2 (15 minutes): Phone call to the on-call engineer
• Step 3 (30 minutes): Alert the whole team

This way, the phone call is reserved for incidents that have already been missed via SMS — ensuring engineers are not woken up unnecessarily for incidents that resolve quickly.

Rate Limits

To prevent alert storms, phone call alerts are rate-limited to 3 calls per hour per user. If an incident triggers multiple checks in quick succession, you will receive at most 3 calls in any 60-minute window. This is configurable in Settings.

Start a free trial and add your phone number for critical monitor coverage today.